The Day The World Went Away
by Falco Conlon
Summary: I closed my eyes with poison in my veins and woke up to poison in my lungs. Marcus Wright before, during and after. Book/Original Script Canon
1. Solitary

Solitary.

The guards would leave the light out, which was against the law, but Marcus preferred it that way. The dark was so much more familiar. He would sit in the corner furthest from the door and sleep with his eyes open. That's what it felt like, anyway. There was nothing to stimulate his senses, no sights, no sounds, no smells but for the slightly musty scent of stone and damp air. He liked to see how long he could go without blinking.

A long time.

Solitary was like that. It was seeing how long you could go without blinking, and it was remembering funny stories from when you were a stupid fucking kid who didn't know a Camero from a Cadillac. The shrink who came to see him (they were going to kill him, you see, and he had to be in good mental health for that) asked him if it hurt to think back on his brother. _No,_ Marcus had said in a dull voice, as dull as it had ever been, dull because he was sitting in the dark, dull because he was waiting to die. But it was the truth, even if it wasn't one that made the shrink smile. He'd frowned, instead, and scribbled something on the clipboard. Marcus considered stabbing the man in the eye with his felt tip pen. They had to be soft tipped, because someone might try to stab them with it. _What do you think about, then?_ The shrink asked, ignorant to how lucky he was that the moment had passed and he didn't have a felt tip pen protruding from out of his eye socket.

_I think about the first time I tried meth with Brian,_ he replied just as dully, enjoying the slight narrowing of the shrink's eyes, h_ow we jacked a black corvette and crashed into a highway barrier. Or I think about fucking my cousin's girlfriend on his bed when he was out getting the beer. Or I think about the first time I fired a gun at a cop._

Eventually the shrink always got up and left. Marcus would be sent back to solitary. He would sit, waiting for the guard to turn the light off, which always came, whether or not he'd behaved himself on the way back to his cell. He was a cop killer. He didn't deserve light. That's what they told him. He was all right with that. He counted seconds. He counted the footsteps of the sentry outside. He counted the hairs on his arm. He counted cars he'd stolen and women he'd fucked. He counted bruises he'd gotten and bruises he'd given. He counted blood cells. Marcus Wright would count the number of shots it took to blow his brother's head off. Four, each one from a different cop.

--

_When he woke up it was dark and cold. The rank stench of rotting flesh was what struck him first. And then, for some reason, he was hyper aware of the fact that he was naked. A vulnerability. He could neither see nor hear anything around him and he started like a shy horse when he sat up and put his feet on wet ground. Wet with what? He wasn't thinking about that. He was thinking about getting up, getting out, getting to light. So long he'd been in the dark. So long he'd wanted the lights off and now there was nothing he needed more than just a flash of illumination. Something to remind him he was alive, that this wasn't hell._

_His climb out of the impossibly huge pit was laborious, but he wasn't tired when he reached the top. Instead of bright sunlight, or even a clear, star-filled sky, a coal-dust gray cloud cover hovered low and suffocating over the grim landscape. The grass was scorched and useless. Someone had salted this earth so nothing would ever grow again. Covered head to toe in muck, in stinking filth, Marcus Wright turned his face up into the rain and screamed. He _was_ in hell._

--

There had been a moment there, sprawled back against Blair on the floor of the helicopter, John Connor sitting on the bench with his wife, Kyle and Star staring wide-eyed out the open door as Skynet Central went up in a cacophony of flame and twisted steel, that Marcus felt as though he belonged. Here were his people. He would stay here with them and they would hold him close, keep him in their company. But as soon as the helicopter landed, and both he and Connor were rushed off to the medevac, he could feel the stares on him. It didn't matter that his heart was pounding so hard the surgeon could hear it standing a foot away, or that he was bleeding his own blood. He was still a machine. They had to untwist the mess of his ribs, wedge them back in place. _Not a human_, they were telling themselves. He could see it in their eyes. Not a human, and so there wasn't any hesitation in their gloved hands as they yanked and bent. It wouldn't hurt him. And it didn't. Not really. It was like getting a tooth pulled with Novocain. He was aware they were doing something; he knew it was happening, could feel the pressure, but nothing else.

It was when they moved in to begin repairing the human part of him that their expressions softened and the movements of their hands gentled. This required the delicate instruments. _It's still me_ he wanted to inform them, _look at my face, you bastards, you're still operating on the same man._

When they were done, they wheeled him into a secluded room at the far end of the bunker. It was warm and dry. A single light bulb swung from the ceiling, but when the last tech closed the door, they didn't turn it on. Marcus was left in the dark, still awake, ordered not to move unnecessarily until his own healing ability had closed up the worst of the wounds. They didn't know what to do about his scorched hand. It was naked metal now, lithe and dexterous. He would have to wear a glove, so as not to alarm anyone who didn't know what he was. He thought about the strength he now carried in that one hand as he stared up at the ceiling, or where the ceiling would have been if he'd been able to see it. Marcus counted his fingers, touched each metal tip to his metal thumb. He counted each metal toe, each metal rib. He counted the times the T800 had bashed him into the I beam. Marcus Wright counted how many years he'd been alive. Twenty-eight. And there would be no more. He was dead now.


	2. Chrystal Meth

_When he was thirteen, his mom kicked his brother out of the house. Four years later, as though it were a rite of passage, she kicked him out too. Marcus had been expecting it since the day she'd tossed Brian on the street, dumping his stash after him (keeping some for herself), letting him sit in the rain, stunned and furious. It wasn't raining the day she threw Marcus out. The cops had brought him back the night before, telling her if he got caught again, they wouldn't bring him home. She would have to bail him out. She'd smacked him so many times (once the cops were gone) he couldn't feel his cheek for the rest of the night. In the morning, he woke up to a bruise. But it didn't matter. He'd planned. Brian had a place. It was a shit hole, but it was a shit hole with a roof, and it was a shit hole where no one cared if you passed out at four in the afternoon because you'd overdone it on the meth._

_It was good for him, he told himself the first night he spent sleeping on his brother's couch, trying to ignore the unpleasant moaning coming through the paper-thin walls. It was good for him._

"Come with me if you want to live."

Once the coast was clear, Marcus took a moment to examine the kid who'd yanked him out of the line of fire, the kid who had taken out a monstrous creature from some Luddite nightmare single-handed. He couldn't have even been seventeen. His eyes felt older. At first Marcus thought it was the same kind of look in the addicts who would trudge into his apartment at two in the morning, willing to do anything for a hit, a tired, done-with-this-mess expression, but it didn't take long for him to change his mind. Reese was not done-with-this-mess. He was just getting started. There was a resilience in his face that Marcus envied. He'd never been that strong.

Reese would always bounce back, and he wasn't the sort to let someone like Marcus bring him down. For the first time since his brother had died, Marcus felt safe.

_He wasn't surprised when Brian left him passed out on the couch. It was all right. They'd already established that they cared more about the drugs than each other. At least, that's what Brian had told him when he'd found out Marcus had fucked the latest in his string of girlfriends. Marcus couldn't help it that girls like him. He always had drugs, and he hadn't let himself go to seed like Brian had. Marcus was only twenty-three. It was the first time he spent any real amount of time in prison. When he got out his friends learned quickly that he'd developed a temper inside. He couldn't take jokes anymore. Most of them watched him out of the corners of their eyes wherever he moved around the room. But Brian was the only one who could still laugh at him and get away with it. When Brian was around, Marcus was still the baby brother, little Mark who fumbled around girls and cried when you twisted his arm to give him an Indian burn. Brian treated him as he always had, but despite not being surprised when he woke up to the cops wrestling him down to the floor, Brian long gone, Marcus couldn't understand how his brother could care more about the drugs._


	3. Ain't Found A Way To Kill Me Yet

Blair fell asleep before he did and he didn't notice how he'd gone perfectly still under her warm weight, except for the thud of his heart in his chest. He didn't need to move, it seemed. There were no twitches in his fingers or pangs in his legs. He'd settled comfortably against the canvas draped soil. The air, after the rain, was cold, the cloud cover low and close. It should have been warm, he felt, stuffy with humidity, but it wasn't and the cold felt empty, unwelcoming.

Marcus had his head tipped back, eyes open, sight full of the thick grey overhead that never dispersed. A nuclear winter. Ash in the rain. He remembered the fallout shelter that had been in back of the old grocery store in Abilene, the one had had closed down the year he was born. Would anyone have had the chance to get in that shelter before the bombs landed, or had Abilene been wiped off the map, leveled by radiation? More than that, he wondered if he cared.

_It was threatening to rain. A chorus of peepers drowned out the faint sound of trucks on the highway a few miles away, occasionally pierced by a bullfrog, low and gulping, a sound that Marcus could feel in his gut. Brian would mimic the sound and they would both laugh. Marcus could feel sweat dripping down the back of his neck, down his spine, down the inside of his leg and he didn't object when Brian suggested they go for a swim. The light from the house was a pinprick in the dark, but easy to see. Not a lot of thick forest in Abilene. The pond was man-made, more mud than water, but when Marcus jumped in, it didn't matter. Mud was as much a relief from the heat as water was, and the smell made the two boys laugh. _

_Their splashing silenced the peepers, but not for long. Determined, the little frogs began to sing once the sound of water had reduced to the occasional splash. Brian told him that if they lay perfectly still, floating on their backs, then the fish and frogs would swim up to them. Maybe one would even think they were logs, he said, and they would get frogs jumping up onto their bare bellies and chests. They never did, but the possibility was enough to keep Marcus as still as he could in the water for what felt like hours. Brian would keep talking. He was always talking, telling him about girls, and junior high, and what life would be like once dad came back again, and how as soon as he got his license he would teach Marcus to drive on the dirt roads that laced between the rundown houses and town._

_Marcus smiled and nodded in agreement when his brother suggested this, but knew it would never happen. As soon as Brian got his license it would be a lot easier for him to run off to parties he was probably too young for, run off to meet girls who thought he'd be their boyfriend, run off with cigarettes stolen from their mother's room, cigarettes Marcus would get smacked for stealing while Brian smoked them behind Abilene junior high. Brian wouldn't teach him to drive because he'd be sixteen, and sixteen was too old to be hanging out with a little brother. Marcus had already watched it begin, the way Brian slammed doors in his face when he tried to follow him and his friends. He'd asked Brian if he wanted to have a sleepover for his birthday like they'd done last year, hanging a tent made out of a tarp in the few scraggly trees by the pond. Brian had laughed and called him a fag._

_But floating in the water, listening to Brian talk now, it didn't matter. He smiled and nodded in agreement because here, a Brian existed who would teach him to drive. This Brian let Marcus hide under his blankets the times they could hear their mother crying downstairs. The air was humid, hot and close, pressing on his mouth and nose like a damp towel. He could feel the rain waiting to fall and knew that as soon as the thunder rolled in, the peepers would stop singing. Quiet before the storm, the peace before the chaos._

When they woke up, Blair didn't waste time in getting her shirt off and explaining that if he wanted it, he wanted it and he should think some kind of advantage was being taken. The world was over. She didn't really care if they'd met the day before. Her flesh was warm and welcoming. He wouldn't say no. The air was close again, but still cold. She was eager, but quiet, cradling him as much as he held her. The peace before the chaos.


	4. In his voice I heard decay

_I was born into a nightmare_. _The world was burning and my boots broke bones on the street. The groan of metal, of gears, of death, that collective groan of a billion people striving for air when there was none, was the first sound I heard._

_I was born into mud, into the clothes of a dead man, and with the stench of rotting flesh in my nose._

There would be no relief. Marcus had never asked, but Kyle told him this anyway. Relentless noise, relentless loss. Easy for Marcus, who never got close enough to lose, but back breaking for Kyle, who loved every drop of blood that hit the ground.

Marcus took to watching the boy sleep. It was deceptive. He slept like there were no monsters. Long eyelashes twitched against his cheeks. He was a child without the luxury of a childhood. Marcus could remember fights at school, paper bag lunches and sneaking into R-rated movies. Kyle would never see an R-rated movie. He would never sleep in until one on a Sunday. He would never skip the last day of school to make out with Samantha Knight in the back of her father's 4x4. He would never go fishing, or bike riding, or swimming at the beach.

Marcus had never been grateful for his own childhood before.

After he'd told Kyle the truth about his past (_I closed my eyes with poison in my veins and woke up to poison in my lungs_) he'd wanted to know if it had been easy to pull the trigger on another human being.

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because I was the machine back then."

"That doesn't make any sense." Kyle's eyes flicked to the glove that covered Marcus' exposed Coltan hand.

"I ran on meth," he explained with a slow, humorless grin. (_The cracking of skulls under foot_.) "Basically the same as a nuclear power source, right?"

Kyle just watched him. Marcus could never hold his gaze. The judgment was righteous, complete. His expression spoke of a pure heart. Kyle would never smoke meth, never rob a gas station, never jack a car. When he fired a gun, red lights went out. Lives were saved, not lost.

Marcus wondered what it was like to be a decent man.

"Why'd you do it?"

"I thought I had to."

"For your brother."

"Yes."

"But he was already dead."

"I never had a convenient enemy, kid," he snapped, beginning to lose patience. "When something shot at me, it was a man pulling the trigger. Once upon a time we killed each other. Did you know that? Guess cuz there was no one else to kill." Humans and their us's and their them's. It made it easier. Us and them. It was inherent with the machines. There were no ambiguities. No moral quandaries. "Simple," he said out loud, to the air (_I woke to ashen sky and salted earth_).

"You call this shit convenient?" Kyle straightened and Connor, seated down the line of watchful or sleeping soldiers, looked up. "You call living in dirt convenient? You call my whole family dead convenient?"

"We all got loss, Kyle," Marcus barked. He could feel Connor watching them. "We all got shit."

Kyle turned his head and fell into a burning, righteous silence. It was often like this. Marcus, despite the months spent with the resistance, would never think like them. He would never be human with Kyle in a way that had nothing to do with Coltan bones (_bleached finger bones half buried in the sand_) or the unnatural beat of his heart. He had never been as human as Kyle.

But, he thought to himself as Kyle slowly, slowly drifted into sleep, had it been the machine in him that had picked up that screw driver, that had wanted to gut the man who'd attacked Blair, or had it been the man?


End file.
